Quotes & Sayings About Death Of A Sister

The death of Mrs. Lincoln was a serious loss to her husband and children. Abraham's sister Sarah was only eleven years old, and the tasks and cares of the little household were altogether too heavy for her years and experience. — John George Nicolay

Either to die the death or to abjure
For ever the society of men.
Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires;
Know of your youth, examine well your blood,
Whether, if you yield not to your father's choice,
You can endure the livery of a nun,
For aye to be in shady cloister mew'd,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
Thrice-blessed they that master so their blood,
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;
But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness. — William Shakespeare

Whilst the wolflets bayed,
A grave was made,
And then with the strokes of a silver spade,
It was filled to make a mound.
And for two cold days and three long nights,
The father tended that holy plot;
And stayed by where his wife was laid, In the grave within the ground. — Roman Payne

Now he wondered what use it would be. For Kaspar's death would not bring back his father, Elk's Call at Dawn, or his mother, Whisper of the Night Wind. His brother, Hand of the Sun, and his little sister Miliana would remain dead. The only time he would hear the voice of his grandfather, Laughter in His Eyes, would be in his memory. Nothing would change. No farmer outside Krondor would suddenly stand up in wonder and say, "A wrong has been righted." No boot-maker in Roldem would look up from his bench and say, "A people has been avenged. — Raymond E. Feist

There was a sound of movement, of clinking glass: Amycus was coming round. Before Harry or Luna could act, Professor McGonagall rose to her feet, pointed her wand at the groggy Death Eater, and said, "Imperio."
Amycus got up, walked over to his sister, picked up her wand, then shuffled obediently to Professor McGonagall and handed it over along with his own. Then he lay down on the floor beside Alecto. Professor McGonagall waved her wand again, and a length of shimmering silver rope appeared out of thin air and snaked around the Carrows, binding them tightly together.
"Potter," said Professor McGonagall, turning to face him again with superb indifference to the Carrows' predicament. — J.K. Rowling

As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her. — Karen Russell

Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away.
Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized she'd never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. — Ray Bradbury

Henceforth we find woman no longer a slave of man and tool of lust, but the pride and joy of her husband, the fond mother training her children to virtue and godliness, the ornament and treasure of the family, the faithful sister, the zealous servant of the congregation in every work of Christian charity, the sister of mercy, the martyr with superhuman courage, the guardian angel of peace, the example of purity, humility, gentleness, patience, love, and fidelity unto death. Such women were unknown before. The heathen Libanius, the enthusiastic eulogist of old Grecian culture, pronounced an involuntary eulogy on Christianity when he exclaimed, as he looked at the mother of Chrysostom: "What women the Christians have! — Philip Schaff

There is a story about the life of Buddha in which a mother carries her dead son to him draped in her arms. The woman has heard that he is a holy man who can restore life. Weeping, she appeals for mercy. Gently, Buddha tells her that he can help save her son's life, but that first she has to bring him a mustard seed secured from a family that has never experienced death. Desperately she searches home after home. Many want to help, but everyone has already experienced a loss--a sister, a husband, a child. Finally the woman returns to Buddha. "What have you found?" he asks. "Where is your mustard seed and where is your son? You are not carrying him."
"I buried him," she replies — Chanrithy Him

In the end, there is cruelty and death alone over the land. Not in a single ray of light or grain of sand will you find solace, for all is dark, and the cold gaze of God's indifferent, heavy-lidded eyes falls on all with equal disdain. Only in your inner strength is there salvation; you must live just as a tree must live, or the cockroaches and fleas that flourish in the land and ruin of Earth. And so you live, and feel the sting of knowing you live. You eat whatever comes to hand, and if what you eat was once a brother or sister, so be it; God does not care. Nobody cares. You whore, and if you whore with man or woman, nobody cares; for when all are hungry, all are whores, even those who use the whores. And disease flourishes when all are whores, for germs must live, and spread across the land and ruin of Earth. — Greg Bear

Death is not the end of things, my sister. It is the beginning of a greater adventure than this small life you cherish can hold. And beyond these shores of death, there are great ships that fly from the golden seas to the skies of pearl. — Douglas Clegg

There once was a girl who found herself dead.
She peered over the ledge of heaven
and saw that back on earth
her sister missed her too much,
was way too sad,
so she crossed some paths
that would not have crossed,
took some moments in her hand
shook them up
and spilled them like dice
over the living world.
It worked.
The boy with the guitar collided
with her sister.
"There you go, Len," she whispered. "The rest is up to you. — Jandy Nelson

There's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I've been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live - ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I'm writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn't get the heroic death. She survives - and that leaves her doing the hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones she loves are gone. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

With events that have passed there is no problem, provided we don't attempt to be wiser that they are, provided we can't use them to further own own ends. If we let them be, the turn into a marvelous solution, a magical acid that dissolves time and space, eats calendars and atlases, and turns the coordinates of action into sweet nothingness. What is the meaning of the riddle? What is the use to anyone of chronology, sister of death? — Andrzej Stasiuk

You better not tup our sister! Or you'll be having us to deal with, Braden MacAllister! (Duncan)
Could I please just deal with one threat of death at a time? (Braden) — Kinley MacGregor

Mummy and Daddy want him to be an evil genius, but he has his heart set on Latin verse. Don't you, Pill?" The boy gave his sister a nasty stare. "Pillover is terribly bad at being bad, if you take my meaning. Our daddy is a founding member of the Death Weasel Confederacy, and Mummy is a kitchen chemist with questionable intent, but poor Pillover can't even bring himself to murder ants with his Depraved Lens of Crispy Magnification. Can you, Pill? — Gail Carriger

Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere.
The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: "It isn't the museum, it should be."
The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief. — Kurt Vonnegut

And then it hits me. They already have. They have kiled her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse than I had at the age of twelve. And even that pales in comparison with Rue's life. — Suzanne Collins

I don't want to die, Buddy.' She put her head on his chest. 'I know this cancer probably won't kill me. But I think about dying all the time. I dream about it. What do you think? Do I get to see Pat on the other side, or do I just lie there in the dirt forever?'
... Buddy wrapped his arms around her and drew her close. 'I think dead is dead,' he said softly, near her ear. 'But that's not so bad. I think of it as following. Following the rest of them ... My mother and father. Your sister. Your mom. But not just them. All of them. All of us. People ... Maybe it's just a way to feel less lonesome about the whole thing, but I think of dying as a path we all go down separately at first, but eventually, together. — Anita Diamant

For it is the suffering flesh, it is suffering, it is death, that lovers perpetuate upon the earth. Love is at once the brother, son, and father of death, which is its sister, mother, and daughter. And thus it is that in the depth of love there is a depth — Miguel De Unamuno

And yet the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount, which is not just for the disciples but for everyone in the eschatological people of God, is just as radical, because it demands that one abandon not only evil deeds but every hurtful word directed at a brother or sister in faith (Matt 5:22). It demands regarding someone else's marriage (and of course one's own) as so holy that one may not even look with desire at another's spouse (Matt 5:27-28). It demands that married couples no longer divorce but remain faithful until death (Matt 5:31-32). It commands that there be no twisting and manipulation of language any more but only absolute clarity (Matt 5:37) and that one give to anyone who asks for anything (Matt 5:42). For a man's — Gerhard Lohfink

If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone? — Jodi Picoult

death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half-waken, thinking of that person with that same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled . . . perhaps not even in death? — Stephen King

Just when it seemed my mother couldn't bear
one more needle, one more insane orange pill,
my sister, in silence, stood at the end
of the bed and slowly rubbed her feet,
which were scratchy with hard, yellow skin,
and dirt cramped beneath the broken nails,
which changed nothing in time except
the way my mother was lost in it for a while
as if with a kind of relief that doesn't relieve.
And then, with her eyes closed, my mother said
the one or two words the living have for gratefulness,
which is a kind of forgetting, with a sense
of what it means to be alive long enough
to love someone. Thank you, she said. As for me,
I didn't care how her voice suddenly seemed low
and kind, or what failures and triumphs
of the body and spirit brought her to that point
just that it sounded like hope, stupid hope. — Jason Shinder

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing
I'm sorry, I would rather not go on. — Yann Martel

See?" my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. "We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?"
And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?
These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. — Lauren Oliver

Prim. I need only to think of Prim and all my resolve disintegrates. It's my job to protect her. I pull the blanket up over my head, and my breathing is so rapid I use up all the oxygen and begin to choke for air. I can't let the Capitol hurt Prim.
And then it hits me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse than I had at the age of twelve. — Suzanne Collins

We used to have a family game, invented by my sister and a friend of hers - it was called 'Agatha's Husbands'. The idea was that they picked out two or at the most three of the most repellent looking strangers in a room, and it was then put to me that i had to choose one of them as a husband, on pain of death or slow torture by the Chinese.
'now then, Agatha, which will you have - the fat young one with pimples, and the scurfy head, or that black one like a gorilla with the bulging eyes?'
'Oh I can't - they're so awful.'
'You must - it's got to be one of them. Or else red hot needles and water torture.'
'Oh dear, then the gorilla. — Agatha Christie

The sky looks comfortingly mundane compared to the garish kaleidoscope of the stained glass. It makes Rose yearn to be reliving any one of a thousand ordinary days spent with her ordinary older sister, who has now done this extraordinary thing and died. — Liane Moriarty

As the nation groped to understand the enormity of their loss, the need to apportion blame was the inevitable handmaiden of their grief. Before it was discovered that the driver was drunk and speeding, it was the notorious paparazzi who were in the dock. Speaking from South Africa, Earl Spencer was the first to point a finger. Visibly angered by the waste of his sister's life he said: 'I always believed the press would kill her in the end. But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case. It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana's image, has blood on their hands today.'
He went on: 'Finally the one consolation is that Diana is now in a place where no human being can ever touch her again. I pray that she rests in peace. — Andrew Morton

His mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking. — George Orwell

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy. — Jandy Nelson

That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians. — Ernest Hemingway,

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation.
Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up.
Survival ... could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943.
Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot. — Blaine Harden

I'm T. Thorne Rose and I did it hard
Til I wound up dyin in the Zen schoolyard
Can't you see it's more important here to use your brain
Than to poison up your body killin other people's pain
Yes, it's Other People's Pain,
That's a trick you might have missed
So let your Sister Rosie hip you to this little twist
The news, the Blues, the pain, the strain,
the lies we've heard since birth
Are only true if we, ourselves, think that's what life is worth
But when you realize that we are all Queens and Kings
You'll drop the death, take a deep breath,
and hear life when it sings
Don't get lost and washed away like a teardrop in the rain
No abuse of any kind has ever come to any gain
Sister T. Thorn Rose from the group Goldensealed — Doug "Ten" Rose

Let me tell you a story, Alix. This ship ... the Talia? It's named after my father's older sister. She killed herself when she was fourteen because she couldn't stand living the horror of her life for another day. With her death she both condemned and freed my father from his monster of a father. I never knew the pain of her life or his. But I named this ship after her to remind me of all the children out there like her and Omari ... the children out there like your sister who are silent in their pain. They have no voice and no hope. But I hear them. Every time I think of my parents. Every time I see Omari, I hear the sobs that are kept inside for fear of it making their lives worse, and I will not stand by and see your sister torn apart by an animal. You help me nail him and I swear to you, I will lay Merjack down at your feet and hold him there while you take your revenge. (Devyn) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Death is a mighty mediator. There all the flames of rage are extinguished, hatred is appeased, and angelic pity, like a weeping sister, bends with gentle and close embrace over the funeral urn. — Friedrich Schiller

No, brother-in-law, you have passed a death sentence on your people and on your Queen, your wife, the woman you have vowed to protect. And do not think your child will escape me. I will search all eternity - I will never cease until the child of my sister dies. — Darren Simon

Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again. — Seanan McGuire

For a moment amongst the crowd, I saw you. I've since found out it's common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one amongst strangers; something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you. — Rosamund Lupton

You spend so much time being upset about being in the hospital in the first place that it is almost jarring to realize how many people don't ever leave. I could have been just like his sister. I could have never woken up. But I did. I'm one of the ones who did. I consider for a moment what would have happened if I'd been standing just a little bit farther in the road or a little bit off to the side. What if I'd been thrown to the left instead of to the right? Or if the car had been going five miles per hour faster? I might not have ever woken up. Today could have been my funeral. How weird is that? How absolutely insane is that? The difference between life and death could be as simple and as uncomfortably slight as a step you take in either direction. Which means that I am here today, alive today, because I made the right choices, however brief and insignificant they felt at the time. I made the right choices. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

He said, "Were he only like his sister - what a difference that would make! For there never was such a sweet and gentle lady! I hear her footsteps, as she goes about the world. I hear the swish-swish-swish of her silken gown and the jingle-jangle of the silver chain about her neck. Her smile is full of comfort and her eyes are kind and happy! How I long to see her!"
"Who, sir?" asked Paramore, puzzled.
"Why, his sister, John. His sister. — Susanna Clarke

My parents were mourning the death of my sister. She was killed in a car accident before I was born, and I didn't know she existed until I was 13 or 14 years old. I knew I was growing up in a house where people were angry and sad. — Andrew Hudgins

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

His fingers gouged into my leg harder. "My sister was in that cafeteria," he said. "She saw her friends die, thanks to you and that puke boyfriend of yours. She still has nightmares about it. He got what he deserved, but you got a free pass. That ain't right. You should've died that day, Sister Death. Everyone wishes you would have. Look around. Where is Jessica, if she wants you here so bad? Even the friends you came here with don't want to be with you."
"Let go of me," I said again, pulling on his fingers. But he only pinched tighter.
"Your boyfriend isn't the only one who can get his hands on a gun," he said. Slowly he eased himself up to standing again. He reached into the waistband of his jeans and pulled out something small and dark. He pointed it at me, and when the moonlight hit it, I gasped and pressed myself against the barn wall. — Jennifer Brown

I can't talk about my childhood at all, because cannot say "I" when I mean "we," and if I say "we" it leads to a conversation about how I have a dead sister, instead of what I want to talk about. I found that out in the summer. So I don't talk about it. — Jo Walton

I'm supposed to trust you?"
"No," he said. He picked up the phone. "Put her sister on." A second later he
handed the small silver device to her.
Summer felt a second of panic - after all, this tiny piece of metal and circuitry
unlocked doors, turned off death traps and blew up houses. God knows what would
happen if she pushed the wrong button. — Anne Stuart

In life, there's a lot that I'm afraid of. Death is always scary. My sister passed away. I'm not scared to die, so much as I was scared to not have her in my life, and it took a long time for me to reconcile that. There are fears everyday, and things that I'm afraid of. I fear everything, but I keep going. — Geoff Johns

A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way-I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.) — Markus Zusak

He had been inspired to start a career in the porn industry after reading the incredible tale of a Japanese man who avenged the death of his sister by going down on her best friend for seven days and seven nights. — Mark Jackman

At the expense of Gregor's sacrifice, the sister, at the end of the story, stretches her arrogant body and gets the liberation Gregor longed for. Under Gregor's care first, and then her parents', the sister enjoys a healthy childhood, one leading to physical and mental development, and one in which she isn't trapped. Yet our loyalty to Gregor extends even beyond death, and his sister's cheery success story offers but a bitter pill — Franz Kafka

In Invisible there's a lot about childhood, the death of the brother and then the relationship between the brother and sister. — Paul Auster

After a night filled with cricket chirps - which were less annoying than she'd thought, because they'd reminded her of girl scout camping trips when she and her sister had been younger - the next morning brought her to something she'd been dreading: it was time to feed the frog. She didn't particularly want to be an accomplice to cricket murder, but neither could she let the frog go hungry. The situation wasn't fair to the crickets or to the frog. Or, really, to her. Ugh, matters of life and death were not her forte. — Cate Rowan

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render. — Charlotte Bronte

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me. — Helen Gurley Brown

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me-or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brains, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes, the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed-doomed to be mine, forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I'm a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I'm insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours. Show me your father, with his kites, his race horses, his free passes for the opera: I will eat them all, swallow them alive. Where is the chair you sit in, where is your favorite comb, your toothbrush, your nail file? Trot them out that I may devour them at one gulp. You have a sister more beautiful than yourself, you say. Show her to me-I want to lick the flesh from her bones. — Henry Miller

Jesus no longer belongs to the past but lives in the present and is projected toward the future; Jesus is the everlasting "today" of God. This is how the newness of God appears to the women, the disciples, and all of us: as victory over sin, evil, and death - over everything that crushes life and makes it seem less human. And this is a message meant for me and for you, dear sister, you, dear brother. How often does Love have to tell us, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Our daily problems and worries can wrap us up in ourselves, in sadness and bitterness...and that is where death is. That is not the place to look for the One who is alive! — Pope Francis

To those you care for, a nurse is a person of many faces: You are a warrior against death and suffering, a technician of the highest degree; you are a mother, a sister, a best friend, a psychiatrist; you are a teacher, a magician, a sounding board, a secretary, a fortuneteller, a politician, but most of all, you are a loving human being who has chosen to give that love in one of the best ways you can. — Echo Heron

His story is colored by the murder of a brother, the rape of a sister, the betrayal of a friend, the pounding of nails into flesh and bone, and the darkening of the sky. A world of what-ifs and could-have-beens, peopled by has-beens and might-have-beens. It is a world soaked in fear and drenched by the blood of a million martyrs. A world of men burned at the stake and babes slaughtered at their mother's breasts. A dark history with pain oozing into all its hidden corners. At the center of history is a death. Christ's death, the decisive point of history. Christianity is perhaps the most morbid religion of the world. Perpetually meditating upon death with little crosses hung around their necks, Christian disciples sing their way to martyrdom. Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. The very hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine a world in which suffering serves as the soil from which resurrection springs. — Ben Palpant

We do this thing. We open our hearts to the world around us. And the more we do that, the more we allow ourselves to love, the more we are bound to find ourselves one day - like Dave, and Morley, and Sam, and Stephanie - standing in the kitchen of our live, surrounded by the ones we love, and feeling empty, and alone, and sad, and lost for words, because one of our loved ones, who should be there, is missing. Mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband, or a dog or cat. It doesn't really matter. After a while, each death feels like all the deaths, and you stand there like eveyone else has stood there before you, while the big wind of sadness blows around and through you.
"He was a great dog," said Dave.
"Yes," said Morley. "He was a great dog. — Stuart McLean

Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone. — Karen Marie Moning

Life is the bitch and death is her sister. Sleep is the cousin, what a fuckin' family picture. You know father time, we all know Mother Nature. It's all in the family but I am of no relation. — Lil' Wayne

Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being ... but there are aother strands that link us, that wouldn't be seen by even the strongest electron microscope ... We are conjoined by hundreds os thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of who you are. — Rosamund Lupton

Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I'd fix on the Chief's raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I'd suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the "black fruit" of love - a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit, she said, because she'd grown it for our mother, our father, Grandpa Sawtooth, even me and Kiwi. Loving a ghost was different, she explained - that kind of love was a bare branch. I pictured this branch curving inside my sister: something leafless and complete, elephantine, like a white tusk. No rot, she was saying, no fruit. You couldn't lose a ghost to death. — Karen Russell

At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson's sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife's bedside.13 He was, his daughter recalled, "in a state of insensibility" when Mrs. Carr "with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted" - and not for a brief moment. Jefferson "remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive." When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty's death. According to his daughter Patsy, "The scene that followed I did not witness" - presumably "the scene" unfolded in the library when he revived - "but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself."14 (Patsy was writing half a century later.) A — Jon Meacham

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death - George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten - the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's — William Makepeace Thackeray

Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin's sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma's brother and the Darwin siblings' joint first cousin. Another of Emma's brothers, Henry, married not a Darwin but a first cousin from another branch of his own Wedgwood family, adding another strand to the family's wondrously convoluted genetics. Finally, Charles Langton, who was not related to either family, first married Charlotte Wedgwood, another daughter of Josiah and cousin of Charles, and then upon Charlotte's death married Darwin's sister Emily, thus becoming, it seems, his sister-in-law's sister-in-law's husband and raising the possibility that any children of the union would be their own first cousins. — Bill Bryson

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister's and my own, and, damn, I'd better live well. — Nina Sankovitch

Romeo appeared in front of us, crossed his arms over his wide chest, and stared at me and Braeden. Braeden didn't seem to mind the death glare he was receiving. "You're looking awful cozy over here with my girl."
"I was just schooling our girl here on the ways of the world," Braeden replied smoothly.
"Our girl?" Romeo repeated.
"Don't get your panties in a twist." Braeden grinned.
I interrupted their macho talk with some talk of my own. "He was asking about Missy."
Romeo grinned.
Braeden dropped his arm from around me and gave me a look of betrayal. "What happened to brother-sister confidentiality?"
I laughed.
"Dude, there's a hot girl in line over there," Romeo said, motioning with his chin. "Go get in line behind her."
Braeden turned and a slow smile spread across his stubbled jaw. "Day-um," he said. "Good looking out, Rome." He held up his fist and Romeo pounded his against it.
"Tutor girl," Braeden said, and then he was gone. — Cambria Hebert

Descartes' Meditations; doubt rise and results in clear and distinct ideas. all in the mind and all innate. Spinoza bakes the best cake, love God intellectually. Oh! God, he should have stuck to polishing glasses or gotten married. Then dear Philosopher we what mettle your are of. Soren Kierkgaard is the king of leer; life is a disease unto death, he proclaimed till death claimed him early. And Nietzche? following Schopenhauer's Superman- was nursed by his sister despite crying foul of the female race and died a wreck man. All theory no practice. Sartre was better , loyal to Simon De ... Both lay next to each other in Paris, witout marrying. — Aporva Kala

What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. — Kevin Hines

Lorcan rubbed his head. "Am I asking too much to want the little bitch dead? Am I?" It seemed Hefaidd-Hen learned long ago not to answer certain questions. "All I want is for her to suffer a painful, horrifying death. And for her head to be on a spike in front of my castle. That's all I want. — G.A. Aiken